When life slips you a Jeffrey, stroke the furry walls

Bow Chicka Wow Wow

Working as a caregiver for ALS Boy Enterprises, LLC has quite a bit of down time. Sure, mornings are seriously high volume — getting me out of bed, putting me on the toilet, transferring me to the shower chair, brushing my teeth, bringing me into the shower dirty and rolling me out clean, drying me off, dressing me (in socks and sandals, still), wheeling me out to the living room and plopping me in the recliner — but it’s usually over by 8:30 AM.

Once that first Boost gets funneled into my stomach and I get hooked up to the Eye Gaze, then begins the down time. I still require suctioning (for excess saliva) every fifteen minutes or so and the occasional trip to the bathroom but for the most part, it’s fairly smooth sledding by and large.

Most of this non-focused-on-the-health-and-well-being-of-their-patient down time is spent watching sports or movies on television but it is not an uncommon thing to overhear the tell-tale sounds of fingers on smartphone. Then there is a brief pause in activity, which is followed by an incoming message sound, which is then followed by another round of typing, more pausing, more typing and so on and so on.

Sometimes the texting gets so consuming and involving that the texter disappears from the living room and into the kitchen for upwards of thirty minutes at a time.

On one such occasion when the texter was busily texting away in the privacy of the kitchen for over an hour, I decided to help set the mood of their conversation by providing background music from my Eye Gaze machine.

I hopped on to Spotify — it’s just like Pandora but with the ability to search for and play specific songs and albums — and typed into the search engine a four letter word that starts with the first consonant after the fourth vowel in the alphabet and rhymes with peppercorn.

(The letter precedes Q, by the way. But you knew that already).

To my absolute and uninhibited delight, up popped a seventy-five track compilation of two minute songs that easily could have been taken directly from those adult-oriented features alluded to in the paragraph above.

As ALS Boy transformed into DJ iGaze for the afternoon by playing tunes with titles like Make You Sweat and Mo Booty for the sole purpose of providing (in)appropriate music to text to, I can only speculate on whether or not my efforts were successful. Or even noticed at all.

Bow chicka wow wow!!

FYI – I still have the entire playlist saved to a folder aptly entitled p***gruves2text2. If you want to hear it, just come over and start texting in the kitchen.